Media & entertainment benchmarks report

How do we compare to everyone else?

To answer this question, we analyzed aggregated data from 3.5 billion users performing 65 billion events in hundreds of media & entertainment products from around the globe—and we had industry experts from NBC, Absolut Vodka, Univision and more to weigh in.

Looking at audio, gaming, video and written media products on Mixpanel, we found average and best-in-class benchmarks on web and mobile in four key metric categories: usage, retention, engagement and conversion. See if your products are as entertaining as the competition’s.

Is usage increasing?

If you’re not growing, you’re dying. ADAU growth—or lack thereof—is the heartbeat of a product. This distribution of products by ADAU growth shows the daily growth rates of the best (and worst) audio products in our dataset.

As the apocryphal Albert Einstein quote goes, “Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.” Sustain the 2.3% DAU growth of 90th percentile products for a month, and you’ll double your number of users.

Are they willing to pay?

This data analyzes the frequency with which users who have used a game then actually use their credit card to pay for something. The majority of gaming products are unable to get even one out of every fifty gamers to make any kind of payment.

When it comes to making money, best-in-class gaming products are leagues ahead of everyone else. With an 8x advantage over the median, the conversion rate of 90th percentile gaming products can paper over a lot of problems.

Are they coming back?

Retention graphs show how often users return. This one highlights that 90th percentile products have almost double the Week 1 retention as median, with mobile higher than web. Find out what distinguishes the loyalists from the fly-by-night types, and encourage those behaviors.

A retention curve that flattens quickly at a high number can be indicative of an efficient, targeted marketing campaign. Building right product is a great start, but getting it in the right hands is pivotal.

When are they most active?

It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that people do more reading on their phones and computers during the work week. There’s commutes and work days to be made tolerable, after all. Notice that the effect is particularly pronounced on desktop. Get back to work, people!

While Mixpanel’s machine learning features can learn your product’s particular usage patterns and notify you of anomalous behavior, reviewing these broader trends can prepare marketers and product people to strike when the iron’s hot.

“As content providers, you have to be on all platforms that your consumers are on. It's not about this platform versus that platform, it's about offering a cohesive experience for consumers.“

Blandon Casenave
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SVP Digital Measurement, NBCUniversal Media

“A media partner being transparent with their data builds trust, which is the most important factor in collaborating successfully.”

Fredrik Thorsén
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Global Head of Digital Marketing, Absolut Vodka

“The future of the film and television industries is digital platforms and entertainment companies ought to be creating their own platforms and using those platforms to understand the customer.”

Michael D. Smith
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Professor Of Information Technology And Marketing, Heinz College And Tepper School Of Business at Carnegie Mellon, author of Streaming, Sharing, Stealing

“The move away from an app-centric strategy is the most encouraging trend I’ve seen in the digital media space, both as a consumer and as a publisher.”

“Mobile games tend to become successful over time, as they grow their audience and see higher levels of installations. Every once in a while there is a phenomenon like Pokémon Go or Fortnite on mobile that have immediate success, but most big mobile games take weeks if not months to trend up in the charts.”